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VANCOUVER - In a perfect world, Henrik Sedin’s 1,000th National Hockey League game would be a home-ice win over an elite team, with standing ovations and an in-game ceremony.

Maybe one of those goal-and-three-helpers evenings when he and Daniel are dangling and cycling and, in Alex Burrows’s happy phrase, “communicating like dolphins” and the opposition’s checkers are mesmerized by passes they never see coming.

If you can picture that, and admittedly it’s been a while, well ...that’s what the captain deserves.

But sadly, there is no “deserve” in sports.

Instead, Henrik will observe his milestone game on a cold Wednesday in Winnipeg, sans the injured Daniel, against another outside-the-playoffs team, his game and his confidence in tatters, with the Canucks going inexorably down the drain while the vultures circle back home, expecting a head on a platter, needing someone to blame and finding a nearly endless list of culprits.

None, however, as tantalizing as coach John Tortorella.

He may not be the most disliked of all the candidates for torching by the angry mob -- general manager Mike Gillis surely outstrips him on that count, with the face of ownership, Francesco Aquilini, making a determined run on the outside -- but he’s the obvious one. ’Twas ever thus, for coaches.

Just for fun, though, let’s try to apportion the responsibility where it rightfully belongs.

On what basis does Tortorella deserve the chop? What has he done that he wasn’t supposed to do, other than charge the Calgary dressing room, get suspended, and pull for Sweden over Canada in Sochi?

Well, he snubbed Roberto Luongo in the Heritage Classic, and that was bad. But it was also the catalyst that made the Florida trade happen, and got the Canucks out from under $27 million of bad contract, so surely Tortorella gets an accidental gold star for that one.

Has he failed to ignite a fire under his players since coming back from his 15-day, pre-Olympic suspension? Yes, he has. In losing 12 of 14 games at a time when a playoff spot has been eminently available despite everything that’s gone wrong, the team over which Tortorella presides has played utterly without poise or confidence, blown leads, given up late goals, and made bushels of grievous errors in judgment.

“As a coach, this is my responsibility. It’s on my watch, what’s going on here. I know the area, I know the owners, I know my general manager are not sitting well with it. But that falls to me,” he said Tuesday, as he and his players licked their wounds from the latest calamity, a 7-4 loss to a substandard New York Islanders roster (with seven rookies and no John Tavares) that nonetheless rang up a converted touchdown on the Canucks in the third period alone.

“People have every reason to be upset about what’s happening,” Tortorella said. “All I can tell you is that I intend to continue to try to do it the way I think it should be done. I’m not sure where it goes, but it’s not going to be for lack of trying to fix it.”

Is he the right guy to do it? It’s hard to tell. The firebrand of 2013 in New York has morphed into an endlessly-patient, tolerant voice of calm reason with the media, and there are no reports of untoward eruptions of Mt. Torts in the dressing room, either.

He was hired to apply a cattle-prod to a group of players plainly on the decline, in hopes of getting something more out of them than they had shown in the latter days of Alain Vigneault’s benevolent reign. It hasn’t happened.

“I think there may be a little misconception out there about the approach we go through,” Tortorella said. “We have tried it a lot of different ways here. Everybody thinks it’s about peeling the paint off the wall and kicking and scratching, it really hasn’t been that way.

“I have changed ... it’s not always, as I think the reputation I have is, my way or the highway. As far as style of play, we’re making adjustments along the way, trying to get better in certain areas. We have had open discussions as a team, because it’s a veteran group and I need information from them.”

There were other candidates for the job, ones who may have had other ideas on how to go about it, but Tortorella was the one Aquilini wanted and Gillis agreed to the hiring. If Gillis thought it was a mistake, he didn’t think it strongly enough to endanger his own five-year contract extension by standing up to the owner.

So as surely as the team’s faltering is on Tortorella’s watch, Tortorella is on Aquilini’s and Gillis’s. But since excrement runs downhill, you know where it’s going to end up.

If both the GM and the coach were not on five-year deals, there’s little doubt Aquilini would pull the trigger right now, as he did when he fired Dave Nonis the last time the Canucks missed the playoffs. But he’d be stuck with an enormous payout, because unlike Nonis, neither this GM nor this coach likely would be hired by another team very soon -- at least, not until the odor of this putrid season fades in the memory.

But he must realize the atmosphere around the Canuck brand is growing toxic. Though it’s always dangerous to try to make generalizations about a fan base, this one seems more indifferent toward their heroes than at any time in the past decade for all the reasons everyone knows: years of poor draft picks, unfortunate trade acquisitions (Keith Ballard, David Booth) and deadline rental busts (Derek Roy), no-trade contracts handed out like party favours -- and exacerbating all these mis-steps, a fatal dithering over deals when they demanded to be made, resulting in the Luongo-Cory Schneider fiasco, a win-win that became a lose-lose for the Canucks.

All of those ills, far outnumbering the odd Chris Tanev and Chris Higgins and Ryan Stanton (and maybe Eddie Lack) on the positive side of the ledger, fall to the GM, under whose dour stewardship the Canucks are now faced with a substantial rebuild. Not quite from scratch, but far too late to remain competitive while it’s happening.

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